Star Cards without the Sparkles

 

Sparkles are missing!

There is an interesting notice that was posted on Calbee's website about a month ago which I only just noticed. As usual they issued a 24 card "Star Card" subset with Series 1 this year.  Those are commonly called "Kira kira" cards in Japanese since they have a sparkly finish on them which will reflect a pattern when you hold them up to the light.  They've been adding that to the Star Cards for many years now, but this year some of the Star Cards were accidentally distributed without the glittery finish on them (as illustrated in the above image.  No sparkles on the cards on the left, cards on the left are sparkly as intended).

According to the notice, anyone who received a Star Card without the sparkles can send in their sparkle-less Star Card and have it replaced with a Sparkly Star Card.

This got me excited and I scoured my collection to see if I had pulled any of those sparkle-free Star Cards.  Much to my delight I discovered that I had!  My copy of Go-Matsumoto's Star Card (S-23) is distinctively lacking in sparkles!  Here it is next to a Daiki Sekine card that has sparkles for comparison:

These sparkle-free Star Cards seem to be legit rarities.  The Matsumoto is the only one I have out of more than a dozen Star Cards I've pulled.  I perused the Yahoo Auctions listings for 2024 Star Cards and of the many available I wasn't able to discern any that didn't have sparkles on them (though its hard to tell from a lot of the photos).  

This is a big difference from the regular card of Hiromi Ito that erroneously listed him as 176 metres in height.  For a couple of weeks there those were getting bid up like crazy on Yahoo Auctions.  Since that initial hype-induced boom interest in those has evaporated and of the many available on Yahoo Auctions right now not a single one has a bid on it.  I just pulled one from a newly released pack (its possible to discern from the expiry dates on the bags of chips they come with how recently a pack of Calbee cards was released) which this late in Series 1's run means they probably won't correct it.  In other words, its basically just a common card of a fairly average pitcher.    

Its the absence of sellers flogging these no-sparkle cards on Yahoo Auctions after they made such a huge deal about the Ito card that makes me think these are quite rare.  Otherwise you'd expect them to be hyped up like crazy by everyone who had one and wanted to pull a quick buck.  

Anyway, word to wise to anyone who finds one of these: You probably shouldn't take Calbee up on their offer to replace it with a corrected one!